Resident Evil director, Devil May Cry producer and former Tango Gameworks boss Shinji Mikami is now making games for Shift Up, developers of Stellar Blade. You know, the one with the shiny bums and quite good hack-and-slash mechanics. The one that has a DLC version of 2B off’ve Nier Automata (pictured). Shift Up have acquired Mikami’s new company Unbound, which he founded in 2022 after leaving Tango.
What exactly are Mikami and co making for the Stellar Bladesmiths? Nothing they can announce for the moment, but Shift Up’s English language announcement post does hint that Unbound are all about “parallel development” – that is, “smaller, experimental titles alongside a large-scale flagship, so neither ambition nor risk-taking ever gets sacrificed to the other”.
I feel there may have been some kind of machine translation error, here – wouldn’t it be a slight contradiction, to sacrifice ambition for risk-taking? I guess being too unambitious could be classified as taking a risk. Regardless, the key takeaway is that they’re potentially making more than one game. Unbound have previously expressed a desire to develop original games for PC and console that feel posher than you might expect from their reported staff of 50.
In the press release, Shift Up’s relatively youthful CEO Hyung-Tae Kim expressed delight at working with the master. “I grew up playing games from Shinji Mikami,” he said. “And now I own his ass.” Oh wait, sorry, that last sentence was me thinking aloud. What Kim actually said was: “And to be here now working together is incredibly meaningful.”
Mikami, meanwhile, commented that “I sense strong synergy with CEO Kim”, presumably while squeezing his eyes shut and holding his hand up to the latter’s face, fingers resonating to the evil within.
The press release also offers some insights from unnamed Unbound staffers about Mikami’s managerial style. They “describe working with him in ways that don’t sound like a typical studio”. According to one team member, “He sits at a desk with us. You can just talk to him.” That’s the kind of cosiness you simply wouldn’t get from a Yves Guillemot, not unless you happened to be carrying the front half of his sedan chair.
What would I, the most important person in this story, like Shinji Mikami to work on next? I would quite like him to veer away from Resi-type things and experiment with something actiony, in the vein of his previous cartoon film-brawler Viewtiful Joe or knee-sliding shooter Vanquish. Here is what Alec Meer thought of the PC version of Vanquish: “a distinctive and solid good time with excellent movement and controls, and some delightfully tricksy setpiece battles.”
